Question

what is the meaning of "the emptiness of ages in his face" in the poem "The Man With The Hoe"?​

Answer 1

Answer:

251.35

Explanation:

Answer 2

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.

The Man with the Hoe is a poem by the American poet Edwin Markham, inspired by Jean-François Millet's painting L'homme à la houe, a painting interpreted as a socialist protest about the peasant's plight.[1] The poem was first presented as a public poetry reading at a New Year's Eve party in 1898. It was immediately published in the San Francisco Examiner in January 1899 after its editor, heard it at the same party.[2] The poem was also reprinted in other newspapers across the United States due to a chorus of acclaim.[2] It portrays the labor of much of humanity using the symbolism of a laborer leaning upon his hoe, burdened by his work, but receiving little rest or reward.

The Man with the Hoe

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.

Who made him dead to rapture and despair,

A thing that grieves not and that never hopes.

Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?

Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?

Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave

To have dominion over sea and land;

To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;

To feel the passion of Eternity?

Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns

And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?

Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf

There is no shape more terrible than this —

More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed —

More filled with signs and portents for the soul —

More fraught with menace to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!

Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him

Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?

What the long reaches of the peaks of song,

The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?

Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;

Time's tragedy is in the aching stoop;

Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,

Plundered, profaned, and disinherited,

Cries protest to the Powers that made the world.

A protest that is also a prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

Is this the handiwork you give to God,

This monstrous thing distorted those who shaped him to the thing he is —